I'm interested in the sort of choices we are going to have to make as we keep extending human lives. Amazingly, more and more people live past 40 and miss out on plagues! As we shape our environment we avoid the more tried and true aspects of natural selection, but have yet to adapt to the new pressures we're creating. For instance, people born with weak heart valves don't die as often now. We've developed a whole suite of technologies to keep them around. A lot of medical technology is like this, expending resources to reshape selection pressures. Others have already pointed out that breast cancer tends to strike after, or at least late in, the fertile years of a woman's life. If there wasn't any medical science available, it's still unlikely that this particular gene would be pushed out of the population. It's only now that woman live long enough to witness its long term effects. So, in this case, we are selecting out a gene that wouldn't have been touched by "nature". Hell, I no longer know my own point. Just typing aloud. I guess I'm wondering if there is an ethical difference between treating diseases that would have likely been selected out overtime and those that are only problematic because we are extending our lives through medicine? Man, I'm going to get some coffee and think...why do I read things like this?

Sadly, at least one guy was probably fooled by the Paranormal State ad campaign. Now he's chatting daily with people who wear Hot Topic tees with the same fervor that Christian teens used to have for WWJD bracelets and wondering if these people understand the way the world really works.

Doctorow has mentioned many times that his main problem as a writer is obscurity. Giving away his books build a fan base. At the same time, he and his publishers still make money on hardcopies of his works. A similar model is at work when AdultSwim streams its shows for free and then sells fans DVD box sets (except they would likely sue you for remixing their content). True, Doctorow and AdultSwim don't capture the value at every possible point, but they definitely get by.

Is it the user's responsibility to turn it off when not in a car? Unless the system works absolutely in the background, I don't see it playing out that well. Testing this in the Bay Area, I foresee a lot of volunteers walking down the streets of San Francisco passively reporting as slow traffic (I assume the GPS isn't differentiating between the 5 foot gap from sidewalk to street). Not that I wouldn't find pedestrian foot traffic data interesting, but I'm doubting it's useful for Mobile Millennium purposes.

By opening up this spectrum, the FCC has given Obama a gift. The Obama technology plan talks about the need to "deploy next-generation broadband" among other things, but with a weakening economy he's going to find a lot less money to back such initiatives. Thankfully, with a simple restructuring of the rules, the FCC has created space for new innovation that might prove easier to fund than laying cables throughout the country. Not that I don't want more cables. I love cables.